Go on Marketing - help us identify customer problems we can sell against

Last week, courtesy of my discussion with Neil Rackham, I described the issues Sales & Marketing can create for themselves as a result of the assumptions over roles throughout the sales cycle.

The first area to address is what Neil Rackham described as "problem analysis tools". Selling, as we all know, starts with identifying a problem we can address with our "products/solutions". So who is responsible for identifying the "problem"? It's clearly both Sales and Marketing.

Marketing can be generic
Marketing clearly cannot know the specifics of an individual's (or their company's) needs, but they can identify the types of issues sales should be looking for that play to the strengths of their product. Here are some examples that help illustrate what I mean

• Technical problems - Every product has been designed to do a job or address a specific problem (the issues the product features have been designed to address). Instead of listing the technical feature (what it is), marketing ought to provide sales with the "problem" the feature was designed to address. An example of this is:
• Instead of describing the security features of a notebook - identify why security is required and the potential impact of having a notebook lost/stolen. It's the "so what?" rather than just the "what?" and is often the first stage of qualification.

• Business problems - All businesses have to address issues around costs, sales, legislation, etc. These are ultimately the things that drive the final decision ( remember that the best technical solution will always struggle against an average solution that better addresses the business issues). Marketing can help the market and their salespeople to understand what business issues their product is best designed to address. Here is another example.
• Find a business that has a high profile "environmental policy" then identify the green credentials of your product and how it helps your customer towards achieving carbon neutrality

• Don't forget emotion -All consumer retailing is based on emotional selling - making you look/feel better, pricking your conscience to give to charity, etc. Marketing could be helping sales identify the emotional phrases that they can focus on.
• These emotions can be identified via "objection handling" - listing the emotional words that are positive and negative. For example, Marketing can say in their collateral that "many of our customers find that the environmentally features of our products help to reduce the consumption of electricity". In this case reducing the use of carbon based fuels is an emotional as well as problem solving feature.

Sales must be specific

Sales have a simple role here "ask questions, listen to the answers and use this intelligence to identify the opportunity".

At the risk of upsetting some of our readers, too many sales people go into "pitch mode" using the generic slideware of Marketing. The role of Salespeople in problem identification is to uncover the unique problems of the prospect, Marketing can only give you the hints as to what you might hear.

So what does good look like?

Accredit has been working with a number of IT organistions to put into practice what we have been preaching here, and it works as follows:

• Marketing builds a "customer viewpoint" for the sales team. This explains the issues customers could be facing and how this links to the features of the product/solution (moving from Feature to Advantage)
• Marketing produces a "call/meeting guide" which lays out how best to have the initial engagement with the prospect (what questions to ask, what to listen out for and link to the offering. (click here to see an example)
• Sales practices the call/meeting before doing it "live"

This is not just a theory - we know it works - If you want to know more why not register on our website as we are regularly adding new examples of call/meeting guides.

Next week we will look at how we build differentiation against our competitors.